


There Is Discord In The Garden Tonight: 6 Looks at Resident Evil

by Noccalula



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, I love Jill Valentine so fucking much, Jill's PTSD is a feature too, Mental Breakdown, Panic Attacks, Post-Resident Evil 6, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Resident Evil 6 Spoilers, Resident Evil Game Canon Compliant, Sexual Content, We found love in a hopeless place, ada wong backstory that i'm making up because who knows, because y'all need to leave Chris alone, let's talk about Leon's PTSD since no one else will, not explicit but it's there, sexual content - especially in the jake/sherry chapter, we're gonna ignore whatever the fuck that was at the end of RE7, we're mostly doing psych deep dives
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-01
Updated: 2019-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21624682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noccalula/pseuds/Noccalula
Summary: Six short character study drabbles about people who have been traumatized by horrific events but still have to do their laundry and put gas in their cars.
Relationships: Chris Redfield/Jill Valentine, Helena Harper/Ingrid Hunnigan, Leon S. Kennedy & Ada Wong, Leon S. Kennedy/Ada Wong, Sherry Birkin/Jake Muller
Comments: 24
Kudos: 46





	1. Jill

**Author's Note:**

> Exactly what it says on the tin. Please enjoy these super short and not exactly light n' fluffy psych dives on our favorite survivors.

Jill watches the lines deepen in Chris’s face in slow motion. He will die doing this job. So will she. The only difference is she wants to – she thinks, anyway – and he most definitely does not. The only talks they ever had about a civilian life, about marriage, about children have all been initiated by him. Chris refused to give up on the glitteringly mundane fantasy of the white picket fence, the life bookended by normal births and deaths. Hospital visits that produce babies. A nice hospice or nursing home at the end as one of them goes gently into that good night. Graduations, school plays, choosing a sensible SUV (that could still be suited up for potential disaster, because Chris may have big dreams but he’s still Chris).

Those talks stopped after Edonia. She didn’t see him for a long time after, to the point that she wondered if they were still together. It’s not like they had too many conversations about the actual state of things. It’s not like they have normal enough lives to worry about it. He disappears for what feels like forever, and she doesn’t sleep with anyone else. She doubts he does either. She’s a little incensed the board outvotes her and sends Piers Nivens to collect him and bring him to Wuyip – if anyone should have been charged with reaching him, it would have made sense for it to be her. But she’s up to her neck in the responsibilities that the BSAA can’t put on the backburner just because one half of the founding team has had a complex PTSD snap and can’t quit drinking in whatever hole he stumbled into.

It hurts like hell to think of him out there, calloused over with pain and having forgotten what sent him screaming out into obscurity. It hurts to think he may not have thought of her. But when he comes back after the terrorist attacks in China, after the underwater field where Piers gave him his soul back by way of a bloody patch shoved into his palm and a sacrifice play right out of Chris’s own playbook, he’s such a raw, exposed nerve of pain and bravery that it re-ignites every ache she ever had for him. She wants to stand next to the furnace of him, soak up some of that radiant pain and beauty and determination, because beneath the pleasant façade of conversations with coworkers and meetings and bureaucratic decision making, she feels cold as a starfish unless something is trying to rip her face off. Unless someone is hitting her. Unless someone is fucking her.

It feels strange to share a bed even after all this time, so they don’t do it all the time. When they’re in the field together – rare, given both of their positions of authority, far more common that they be split between jobs and demands – they do, and those rare breaks where neither of them is gone. But even then, Jill often sleeps alone in the guest room, still too plagued by nightmares of total autonomy loss, of the sound of Wesker’s voice. She still wakes up screaming some times, sweating and gasping others. Chris wants to be near her, to sleep beside her so he can comfort her when those night terrors come, but Jill is too afraid of hurting him, too scared she’ll have a weapon too close to the bed and six pints of Chris will soak the nice linens of their still too-antiseptic bedroom.

The mornings that she does wake beside him, Chris slips his calloused fingertips down the curve of her back, across the backs of her arms, watching her in the new daylight like she’s a life raft. He still looks at her like he’s in love. She shuts her eyes and waits for the day she can look back at him with that kind of brave honesty. In the meantime there’s monsters to kill, decisions to make, global threats to fight.

The job never sleeps.


	2. Leon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leon goes to Starbucks and proves that a perfectly normal thing on a perfectly normal day can set you off.

Leon is standing in a Starbucks when the barista calls out his name, brandishing a ridiculously large frappucino with his name scrawled across the plastic near illegibly. He’s been scrolling absently through his phone, past the 127 missed calls/unread messages/emails he has deliberately chosen not to click on despite the names in bold. Sherry. Claire. Helena. If someone found Leon’s phone in a world where it didn’t have an incredibly sophisticated set of security protocols on it, they’d think he was a player to the Nth degree – all these women’s names in his phone, all these pictures.

There’s an email from his cable company letting him know his auto-pay went through. Like everything is fine. Like he never spent weeks killing his way through small villages of parasite-controlled people. Like he hasn’t lost consciousness via concussion so many times that his doctors are already throwing around terms like ‘early onset Parkinsons’ and ‘dementia’ as eventualities, even if he does a complete 180 and retires completely. Like there’s any option for him but to bide his time between bone-deep horrors that will demand him to give more than could ever be realistically expected. Like this normal, even boring day of running errands and buying himself a coffee he’d never let anyone from his job see him drinking is his life and not just a brief respite from death, death, death, reigning down on him from all directions, coming from his own hands, a thousand lives extinguished by the pull of a trigger or the jam of a hunting knife into soft flesh, like the feeling of grazing bone doesn’t set his teeth on edge when he’s stabbing someone in the ribs just the same as when he’s carving a rotisserie chicken into portions for multiple days because there’s never anyone else sitting at the table but him so he eats on the couch and –

The frappucino slips out of his hand in slow-motion, the pass from the barista fumbled by his half-present attentions, and he watches it fall to the floor like he’s experiencing it from across the room. A knife tumbles from his hand only to be caught from beneath as he tangles at the edge of a razor with Krauser. A grenade hits the floor and rolls as he turns to shield Claire, to throw her to the ground and pray it’s far enough away that all that happens is their ears bleed and this big bastard chasing them might finally die. Ada – _Ada_ – throws her sunglasses to the carpet, they beep, and he knows she’s activated a flash bang in the most irritatingly smooth way possible. Helena’s mutated sister falls from the edge of the pier what feels like a thousand miles below the city. It’s all falling, all constantly in motion, all spiraling for the inevitable and never quite landing until suddenly there’s a crack and blood splashes all over his shoes, the sick splatter of it hitting his pants and the floor around him.

He blinks, staring open-mouthed at the blood at his feet, the familiar twist of sickness at the loss he knows is coming if he could just ssee who it was, whose blood is this? Whose blood?!

“Sir?! Sir, there’s no blood, it’s okay, it’s oka-“ a hand catches at his upper arm and his attention snaps up so quickly that the small crowd around him jumps back. He’s already got his hand at his hip, wrapped around the belt holster of his gun. The terrified girl freezes, her eyes blown wide and blue and scared shitless, and Leon exhales what feels like a breath he held for hours. He looks down. There’s whipped cream and caramel and frozen coffee slush everywhere and he’s kneeling right in it, hand covered like he was searching for something in the spill. Someone’s hand. Someone’s face. Someone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can find me at noccalula-writes on Tumblr or noccalula1 on Twitter.


	3. Sherry & Jake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The closest I've come to shipping something as zealotously as I ship Chris and Jill. 
> 
> Bring back Jake Muller, you cowards.

Jake is surprisingly tender. He wants to go on _real_ dates – insists on it, in fact, with all the pomp and circumstance of dressing up just enough to show off that he’s taking care of himself so well nowadays and he wants Sherry to be proud. He picks her up on the bike or in the fancy company car he cruises in when he wants to look more responsible. He spends half the evening talking and cracking jokes and the other half smiling at her across the table in that wistful way he does between “You’re beautiful” and “God, I wanna take you home.”

She so rarely knows where she wants to go, so he provides her with a list of restaurants he’s curious about and lets her pick. Everyone stares at them when they go out together – him in his slick button downs and nice tailored pants, the fierceness of his blue blue eyes and his red red hair and those oh-so-sexy scars he won’t even pretend he’s ashamed of anymore, Sherry in pretty dresses and blazers, practical but elegant, her shaggy blonde cut that’s always just a touch too long for where she wants it and her big blue eyes that catch the light just so. He speaks perfect French in Chateau La Croix and the waiters are all impeccably charmed by the two of them. He speaks perfect Spanish at Local Cantina when they need a beer with their tacos and a place to take the suit jackets off and reminisce.

Sherry never dated the way most people date. Her relationships were limited to the peers that she knew through the programs she submitted to or others in her training classes. It was never organic or old-fashioned, no ‘can I have your number?’ or meeting at restaurants. It was assumptive and stilted, awkward fumblings in clinical bedrooms or uncomfortable silences when she should have been talking about her day. Who would understand? Leon, of course, and Claire, but they weren’t just close friends, they were her heroes. There was no equity there in Sherry’s eyes – her own peers could never understand what she’d been through, how hard it had been to become who she became despite all the torment, the torture, the testing.

When Jake has bouquets of expensive flowers sent to her office or her apartment, when he arrives at the door with jewelry (handmade, from the street markets in whatever country he happened to be fresh off the plane from because he knows she has strong feelings about diamond mining practices), when he sends a postcard with just a “Miss you, J” scrawled across the back, she gets butterflies. Even when she sighs and makes a production for her coworkers about being gently exasperated by his very public affections, all she can think about is when he’ll be back.

Jake’s history isn’t explicitly spelled out but it’s clear enough; she expected him to be coarse in all arenas but that smooth talking of his. She went wide-eyed into his bed the first night, expecting a rowdy fuck from a mercenary who’s been very blatant about his desire for her from the time they left China. She expected a pornographic performance and while she hadn’t exactly been dreaming of that kind of encounter, she had to admit some curiosity on her part as well. Her blowjob skills were virtually nonexistent but she was a fast learning with a commitment to perfectionism that she figured could make up for whatever she lacked in the kind of speed he was accustomed to.

No such scenario. He’d been so gentle and slow she’d had to ask him to pick it up a notch when the agonizing friction refused to give her just what she needed to get off for the second time that night (of course, foreplay consisted of nearly an hour of him eating her pussy so thoroughly she was sure he had every part of her memorized by tongue). He looked her in the eyes from where he hovered over her, one hand carding tenderly through her hair as the other braced the headboard, rolling his hips up to meet hers in deep, careful thrusts. He told her she was beautiful, she was perfect, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen _oh god_ how was somebody how was _anybody_ that beautiful?

“One day, Supergirl,” he pants softly as he lays spent beside her, reaching up to tap the firm pec over his heart, “Gonna tat your name. Right there.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Sherry challenges hoarsely, her eyes glittering in the dark, and she hopes he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, you can find me on Tumblr at noccalula-writes or on Twitter at noccalula1. 
> 
> Come scream your Sherry/Jake feelings at me because I have a /lot/ of them.


	4. Ada

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ada Wong longs. Simone Biles is mentioned.

Ada sits in a hotel room in Brussels, her bare feet crossed lazily atop a mahogany table that cost more than her first car, and watches Simone Biles crush the uneven bars on the flat-screen mounted on the wall. The pricey German lager in her hand is starting to bead sweat down the glass. She watches the gymnast of a lifetime do a full hip circle – easy bait, she’s followed Biles long enough now through whatever snatches of quiet time she gets to know that she could do that in her sleep – and contemplates the past.

No one knows anything about her, and that’s how she likes it. Leon’s love for her – and sometimes she wonders how much closer it borders to infatuation given the facts of how little he knows – is a superimposition over the glimpses of her he thinks he got back in Raccoon City. So long ago. Wistfully, she takes a sip of her beer, unmoved by it. She’s not a big beer fan in general but, y’know. When in Europe.

A dark red mini-dress hangs on the back of her door, a pair of Loubiton sling-backs on the carpet beneath. It’s a becoming enough dress on her, though she’s a little more reticent these days to throw on a dress for work. It’s not like she’s aging very quickly – proximity to so many viruses over the years have given her, let’s say, _perks_ that she tries not to think about too hard – and even if, she feels more attractive now than she ever did when she was still young and wide-eyed, but even she had to admit that the panache of the red slit dress has worn thin. Still. Dressing up is fun, when you’re able.

She’ll put on the dress, a slash of MAC’s Ruby Woo (on the nose maybe but it flatters her most), her deliberate fuck-me heels and go out to dinner with a colleague she’s only ever met once before in video conference. He’s an above-competent tracker who’s been tasked with finding Albert Wesker’s deposits of intel, scattered in improbable places across the globe in the event that, say, Chris Redfield shot him in an active volcano with a rocket launcher. That was Wesker. Ever pragmatic, even in his egotism. She’ll make small talk over dinner like they’re on a real date, exchange the info as discreetly as possible, and if he still looks the way she recalls from the video feed, she’ll invite him back upstairs, ride his face, and then throw him out.

Maybe, just maybe, she’ll fuck him, but it will depend on if his hair is grown out long enough that she can card her fingers through it and imagine Leon.

Guess he’s not the only one hung up.

Simone Biles hits the Fabrichnova dismount like she’s done it every day of her life forever, effortlessly beautiful, and Ada thinks about her youth, about the day she went to pull a rotation on the lower of the uneven bars and scraped her toes across the ground, nearly breaking one. She’d gone from 5’2 to 5’9 that summer, all legs, and suddenly a promising athletic future as a gymnast was gone. Her coach only wanted smaller girls for his best routines, up the odds of getting scouted for the Olympics. It had felt like a mid-life crisis, to be 12 and have all of her plans radically restructured because of something she could no more control than the weather.

Then again, it was a pretty good set up for everything that was coming, wasn’t it?

Her phone chirps from the table and she doesn’t need to pick it up to know who it is. Showtime. The crowd roars approval at Biles’ beautiful smile, and Ada smiles too if only for a moment, proud of this girl she doesn’t know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know the drill by now.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading - I know the fandom isn't super huge on AO3 but please know I am among you. <3


End file.
